I will be doing Ludum Dare tomorrow. This will be my ** TENTH ** consecutive Ludum Dare, and this is my tenth post on this blog with “I’m in!” in the title, and I’ve completed every single LD I’ve entered, although some people might take issue with me saying that considering game #9 didn’t work unless you had the SMFL development libraries installed. WHATEVER, I’LL FIGURE OUT HOW TO FIX THAT EVENTUALLY. Also, I’m never using SMFL again.

*This* time, I am using Jumpcore, my personal-ball-of-hacks C++ framework:
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/jumpcore
I plan to incorporate library code from the Jumpcore forks in one of these two projects:
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/blit
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/geodesic

I will be working alone.

I will be doing the 48-hour jam.

I know exactly what I am going to make.

It will not be a game.

It will be an art program.

I do not intend to follow the theme.

Oh! Um. I forgot to make a post! I’m in! I’m doing this! This will be my ninth consecutive Ludum Dare.

My eighth consecutive Ludum Dare and yes, I’m doing this again. I am planning to do the jam and not the compo, but so you know, I am likely to base on open source code from the C++ framework found on my bitbucket page:

https://bitbucket.org/runhello/jumpcore/wiki/Home

And possibly reusing graphics library code from a prototype game and prototype level editor I posted in the last month:

https://bitbucket.org/runhello/bodyhack
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/splinecraft

I am *considering* a last-minute decision to go with Flash.

I am excited about doing something with Evan Balster’s “Plaid” library.

Keeping this short: I’m gonna do Ludum Dare this weekend. It will be my seventh time doing this. You can see my other games, including my LD entries, at runhello.com.

I’m planning to do the Jam, so this doesn’t matter, but I currently plan to base my entry on one of the two following open source Lua template projects:
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/polyconsole
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/ufo

I’m really really hoping the theme will be “10 seconds”.

I think this will be cool. 😀

Hi hi, I’m mcc, I’ve done the last 4 LDs, always the compo. The game I made last time– an evolving game for the Evolution compo– actually did pretty well, placing in the top ten. This time I’m doing something a little different. I and Liz Ryerson have decided to make a game together and enter it in the 72-hour jam, something I’ve never done before. I’m a little worried because the compo always seems like kind of a mess compared to the compo, but I’m excited about working with Liz so I don’t care. I might also make some kind of ridiculous barely-theme-appropriate noise toy in 2 hours and enter it in the compo, but I’m not sure.

I’m mainly a coder, and I reuse engine code from project to project, so I am certain to reuse for the jam code that has been part of one of my previous projects, specifically one of my projects based on Ivan Safrin’s Polycode. The source code for all my projects is at my BitBucket page; in particular, right here is code for an isometric level editor sort thing that I was writing for Liz and I to use this weekend, but didn’t finish in time. Let’s see what happens!

If you want to see an overview of my game making workflow / codebase, see here for this long blog post I wrote about it and am kinda proud of. (I have aspirations to someday make tools or libraries to help other people make games, but I don’t think I’m really at the point I’ve ever made anything useful yet.)

Meant to post earlier this week but okay! One way or another, I am doing Ludum Dare this weekend! I’ve done this three times before, producing a game called You Don’t Fit for LD21, one called My Own Footsteps for LD22, and one called Breathe for LD23. My biggest threat to completion is an LD warmup project I started last weekend (link goes to unfinished prototype), which got way out of hand and threatened to eclipse LD itself. I’m somewhat considering spending the weekend finishing that and then submitting it to the jam, if the theme fits and that’s allowed. I’ll see Most likely I’ll dash something off based on a brief whim shortly after the theme is announced, which is what I’ve done the last two times and found surprisingly enjoyable. I may wind up having only a part of the weekend to work on the project– I will be spending Saturday vending a booth at the Petaluma Reptile Expo?!

I will be basing on these open-source game tools based on Ivan Safrin’s Polycode. I reserve the right to adopt library code from any of my previously posted BitBucket projects.

I should be posting a for-reals I’M IN post next week, but! I posted something this weekend I wanted to share.

I released the tools that I’ve been using for the last year to make games. (Well, they were technically on BitBucket all along, but now I’ve released compiled and packaged-up versions so you don’t have to spend days fighting with CMake!) The tools are based on Ivan Safrin’s Polycode and let you make 2D or 3D games in Lua. I used this framework to make my LD23 entry, “Breathe”.

I realize there’s a TON of options for game development out there, but if anyone’s interested in giving this a shot, I’d be curious if you actually manage to make anything with it

The prototype I’ve got as of the end of day 2. You can move an avatar around, and there are two screens, which you can move between.

Mac version
Windows version

In a sense, the game here or at least the code is “done”, at this point it’s just making more screens. However I’m very worried about time. I’d wanted to be further along by now than I actually am.

I just spent the last two hours on an incredibly disheartening, basically failed attempt to add music, most of it spent digging through boxes desperately trying to find a 1/4-inch audio cable. (I eventually managed to jury rig a cable by plugging a bunch of adapters together; I then discovered one of the cables was broken.) By the end of all this I was very loopy but I had an ogg file, which then wouldn’t play; after half an hour, and crazy lengths like rolling back vcs, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get any ogg files to play, I realized I had typed a line like “bgmusic = new Sound()”. Problems here: (1) that is a line of C++; (2) the program is written in Lua. At this point I realized I was badly messing myself up by trying to do this without sleep. So: Sleep now 😛

Last night before I went to bed, I fed Drawception the prompt “Ludum Dare”.

This is what happened.

(Drawception is a web version of Eat Poop You Cat, it’s a telephone game where random players alternate trying to describe a picture with a phrase and draw a picture from a phrase without being able to see any of the words or images that lead up to it.)

This is gonna be my third Ludum Dare. I’ve actually participated in the last two– for LD21 I made an intricate and fairly complete prototype of a game I may go back and “finish” someday, for LD22 I wound up busy all weekend and made a bizarre generative sound demo on the last day. I think I’m getting better at this whole game jam thing– since I did LD21 I’ve also participated in two of the Pirate Karts and also the Molyjam. (You can find the full list of my games here.)

I am planning to make my game this weekend, whatever it is, with Polycode, a library I’ve been moving my development to over the last year in the hopes it would let me write part-C++-part-Lua programs with little fuss. There has admittedly been some fuss. Polycode is alpha and has some usability issues, so I spent most of my free time the last few days trying to clean up Polyconsole, my get-started-with-Polycode project (which has some niceties like a debug console), partly so that it would be in a good shape for me to use for LD, and partly so that I could then write up a nice blog post and post my tools before LD so that maybe other people could use them. And, well… I did get Polyconsole actually in what I would think of as a “ready to show to others” state before LD started! Here’s what the demo I’ve been working on with it looks like right now:

…except… that was all I had time for before LD, meaning I didn’t write any documentation. And without documentation and build instructions I don’t think my code will be much use to anyone. But, if you want to see the codebase I’m gonna be working from this weekend, see here. I’ll write a more useful blog post about what “Polyconsole” is after LD. You’ll have to take my word for it: It’s TOTALLY AWESOME.

Anyway: Ludum Dare 23. I’M IN

So I went into this LD with a specific goal to make a game using Polycode. Instead, I wound up out of the house basically nonstop from the start of the competition until late Saturday night. So Sunday morning I got up, STARTED a project using the framework I used for my previous Ludum Dare entry, and except for a break to go to Burger King did not stop until I was done. Nothing survived from the idea I had when I started this morning except for the sound.

The result is called “My own footsteps”, it took me about seven and a half hours start to finish and it is the first 3D game I have ever made. I hope it amuses people, I very much like the sound.

My Own Footsteps

Going to do Ludum Dare this weekend, for the second time! If you’d like to see my previous projects (including my last Ludum Dare game, which was called You Don’t Fit), see here.

My plans: I intend to use Polycode to make my Ludum Dare game this time. I’m really excited about starting to make games with Polycode but I’m still struggling to get past startup issues. I have a Polycode template project I’ve been working on which adds to the basic Polycode template project an SVG loader and an interactive LUA console; I’m hoping I’ll have that working enough to my satisfaction that I can use that as the base code for my game this weekend. If I succeed, I’ll be pulling from this open source repository as a base for LD.

It’s possible that either outstanding bugs with my LUA console, a shortage of time this weekend (I’m only going to get to spend a small part of the weekend on my LD game… I have tickets to see Dntel in Santa Cruz :D), or a really inconvenient theme will mean I have to abandon Plan Polycode, in which case I’ll be using my personal C++ framework that I used for the last LD, and possibly pulling library code from one of the games I’ve previously released as open source.

I am excited about doing LD again, though I hope I can get my time/LUA issues sorted out before the weekend.

Uploaded my final mac/windows builds to my server at 6:55 and 6:57, spent the last two hours trying to get the LD site to load, making blog/twitter type posts and building a Linux version. In the end I named it “You Don’t Fit”.

And… success, I think! The game is small and I have no idea what will happen in voting, but my goal with LD was just to prove to myself I could make a game with the 48-hour constraint (even my simple game projects tend to take months and spiral out of control) and I met my own little personal goals. There are some things I might have done different with a longer timeframe– I think the puzzles could have been deeper than they are (although it does have a facility for user levels!) and I had some ideas about sound and graphics that I didn’t have time to explore. But: I met the deadline, and the game feels “complete” to me, it has non-placeholder (if simple) sound and graphics and it’s possible to win. So, woo.

– My blog post about the game

– My entry on ludumdare.com

Thanks everyone for the support and the platform, and now it’s time to go try to play everyone else’s games 😀

Mac version
Windows version
Source Code

ATM I have a level loader and you can move around on the screen. That’s it, not much to see yet. I’d hoped to be further along by this point, but this isn’t terrible, either.

I do know where I am going with this.